WND EXCLUSIVE

New study: Porn addictive like drugs

Expert pins blame for 'incalculable social damage' on 'sexual imagery'

Bob Unruh joined WND in 2006 after nearly three decades with the Associated Press, as well as several Upper Midwest newspapers, where he covered everything from legislative battles and sports to tornadoes and homicidal survivalists. He is also a photographer whose scenic work has been used commercially.

A new study from Cambridge University has been catching headlines in the United Kingdom over its finding that the same area of the brain impacted by addiction to drugs or alcohol “lit up” in people addicted to pornography.

But Judith Reisman, a dynamo who has exposed 1950s sexual revolutionary Alfred Kinsey as a fraud, said it’s the argument she’s been presenting for years: The addictive power of porn.

She even has coined a term for the chemicals that stimulate the brain under the influence of porn,”erototoxins.”

“My term ‘erototoxin’ refers to natural, endogenous chemicals associated with sexual arousal that synergistically works to induce an addictive milieu in the brain,” she told WND.

She noted that toxin, from the Latin toxicus, means literally “imbued with poison,” which, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is “any substance which, when introduced into or absorbed by a living organism, destroys life or injures health.”

“So, is porn toxic?” she asked. “Of course it is and always was.”

Reisman pointed out that the 2009 Butner prison study by Michael L. Bourke and Andres E. Hernandez found that 85 percent of men arrested for child pornography also had physically abused children.

In the U.K., the Cambridge study concluded compulsive users of pornography “show the same signs of addiction in their brain activity as alcoholics or drug addicts,” the London Times reported.

“Scans showed that a central portion of the brain which is stimulated in drug or alcohol addicts also ‘lit up’ when compulsive pornography users watched explicit material. There was no such effect in the brains of people who were not habitual users of porn,” the Times said.

Dr. Valerie Voon, a neuropsychiatrist at Cambridge, said in the report: “We found greater activity in an area of the brain called the ventral striatum, which is a reward center, involved in processing reward, motivation and pleasure.”

The London Independent reported the Cambridge study found that MRI scans of test subjects who admitted to compulsive pornography use “showed that the reward centers of the brain reacted to seeing explicit material in the same way as an alcoholic’s might on seeing a drinks advert.”

The paper explained the study is yet to be published but it will be featured in a documentary called “Porn on the Brain” which is to air Sept. 30.

Kinsey’s post-World War II work on human sexuality routinely is cited today in school and college textbooks, by social researchers and by many others who have not fully investigated his methods.

Reisman exposed Kinsey’s reliance on “illegal sexual experimentation on several hundred young children.”

Kinsey’s research was presented as a representation of all of society – that “greatest generation” that delivered the world from Nazism and fascism – even though the subjects were “sex offenders, prostitutes, prison inmates and exhibitionists.”

Reisman charges that the sex research Kinsey began in 1948 at Indiana University, which shook America’s moral foundations and launched the 1960s sexual revolution, was based on a lie.

She has been a scientific adviser for the California Protective Parents Association and former president of The Institute for Media Education. She has consulted for four U.S. Department of Justice administrations, the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

“It is clear that of all addictions, addictions to the abnormal sexual imagery that now floods society are causing incalculable individual loss and social damage,” Reisman said.

“We’re collecting huge numbers of young men recovering, trying to recover from sexual addictions. The reason they’re trying to recover is they’re impotent. Japan, Italy, England, all over.”

Reisman noted there were broader, societal concerns about the impact of pornography.

In an 1996 letter to North Carolina psychiatrist Dr. Linea Smith, Robert O. Heck, former head of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention in the U.S. Justice Department, wrote of the connection to violent crime:

If I were to try to make a concise declarative statement on the subject, it would have to be this: Without any significant exception pornography is the background stimuli for molesters, rapists and serial killers. Our thresh-hold of allowable violence has been increased by our visual exposure to violence, and the sexual exploitation depicted in pornography. There are hundreds of interviews and studies of convicted molesters, rapists and serial killers that will attest to the fact that pornography was a pervasive instrument of exciting and fueling their desires and activities.

Reisman said an estimated 16 million Americans engage in compulsive sexual behavior.